Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: A review paper

Rocco Zizzamia, Anda David, Murray Leibbrandt
ACEIR Working Paper no. 8, April 2021 

Very little attention has been paid to African inequality dynamics in high-profile international discussions of changing global inequality despite the fact that African dynamics will become increasingly important to this global discussion. Within the continent, recent years have seen distributional issues becoming more central because of the importance of inequality in inclusive growth. Therefore, the review takes stock of what can be said about African inequality to promote better analysis and better policymaking in addressing inequality on the continent. The authors’ assessment of the drivers of inequality in Africa pays particular attention to the themes of intra-household inequality and gender and also inequality of opportunity and social mobility in Africa. The complexities of household formation and composition, for example the high frequency of polygamous households in some countries, are at the heart of access to resources and, therefore, important for the accurate assessment of inequality in any African context. African inequality analysis always requires that analytic attention be devoted to both rural and urban contexts and the linkages between them. Read more